archaeology, illustration and comics

Getting Here

The idea of doing a comic about the heritage, history and archaeology of Oswestry first came to me a few years ago, when the potential of nearby development lead to a renewal of local interest in Old Oswestry iron age hillfort. At that point, I had been working with comics and archaeology for a couple of years, and had become increasingly convinced that they were a really useful way of talking about archaeology with a public audience. Why?

Well, two reasons. The first is that, because they integrate both image and narrative – words and pictures – they could be used to condense and simplify complex archaeological information without dumbing it down. The visuals could be used to provide visual context and visual explanations of things that were difficult to get from text alone – how a place looks, or how layers within a trench relate to each other. The fact that the text was presented as narrative meant that it was easy to present information in a way that didn’t rely on (but could still use, if necessary) technical language or jargon.

But telling the whole story of any one site is a tricky proposition, no matter what the medium. When I was asked by Rachel Pope if I would be interested in producing some short comics last summer about her excavations at Penycloddiau iron age hillfort, I realised that – with only four, four-panel comics – I would only be able to tell part of the story. But which part?

In many of my archaeological comics, chronology or interpretation has provided the structure. In other words, the narrative has been based either on saying what happened first, what happened next, and so on (chronology), or on saying what a piece of archaeological evidence means, what that means something else means, and so on (interpretation, or argument, if you like). But these kinds of exposition require a certain amount of space – space I wasn’t going to have in these four-panel comics for Penycloddiau. So instead, I decided to approach the information about the site thematically: “Student training”, “Connections”, “Context” and “Day of Archaeology”. What this allowed me to do was to snapshot a lot of quick facts and information about different aspects of the site and its archaeology into each comic, and in doing so, build up an overall picture out of those individual elements. Each comic worked kind of like a page in a photograph album.

It’s this thematic approach which I’ve taken with the Oswestry Heritage Comics. Each comic is a series of snapshots of lots of different aspects of history, archaeology and heritage, building up an overall picture out of many individual elements: an album out of individual photographs, if you like. The theme of this week’s episode – “Getting Here” – is obviously transport heritage: toll roads, railways, canals, bronze age trackways, footpaths, and Roman roads. But combining this thematic approach with visual context and a narrative text has allowed me to bring other things into the story: engineering, ancient history, heritage preservation and tourism. I feel like this approach enables me to have “a lot going on” in each four-panel strip.

About Me

I've been an archaeologist and illustrator for over twenty years, working mostly on prehistoric sites in the UK, eastern Europe, Anatolia, the West Indies and the Pacific. I'm particularly interested in the role of narrative in archaeological visualisation. Over the past few years this has resulted in writing and illustrating comics for archaeological excavation projects, sites and museums, including CADW and the Museum of London.

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